I saw a reference to the "nocebo effect" today in an article I read. The author defined it as "when people think that their health is threatened by an intervention, they will report more symptoms." In this case patients' feet were chilled, and they then developed cold symptoms. Therefore, the researchers linked being chilled to being more prone to cold viruses. The critic, instead, called the study flawed and said the results were due to the "nocebo" effect.

Have you heard of this effect before? I haven't and would love to know more about it.

I hadn't heard of it before, either, but OneLook lists eight dictionaries with the word. And it's in the OED Online.

nocebo, n

Med.

[< classical Latin nocebo I shall cause harm or be harmful, 1st singular future indicative of nocere to harm (see NOCENT n. and a.), after PLACEBO n.]

Chiefly attrib., esp. in nocebo effect, response. A detrimental effect on health produced by psychological or psychosomatic factors such as negative expectations of treatment or prognosis, cultural beliefs about illness, personality traits, etc.; spec. adverse effects reported after administration of a placebo.

1961 W. P. KENNEDY in Med. World 95 203 It is somewhat surprising that little attention has been drawn to the existence of the contrary effect [to the placebo]--which I may call the nocebo reaction. 1969 Encephale 58 486 Attempts to define the secondary effects of placebos, i.e., the nocebo effect. 1981 Pavlovian Jrnl. Biol. Sci. 16 140 (title) Nocebo: the psychologic induction of pain. 1985 Anthropol. Today 1 8/2 One further example of the pathogenic effect of cultural beliefs (also called the ‘nocebo effect’), is the well-described ‘voodoo death’ or ‘magical death’, reported from many parts of the world. 1997 Clin. Orthopaedics No. 336. 94 Financial reward for illness thus functions as a powerful nocebo, a nonspecific force creating and exacerbating illness. 2002 Washington Post (Home ed.) 30 Apr. F1/2 Patients experiencing the nocebo effect..presume the worst, health-wise, and that's just what they get.

Tinman

Furthermore it gets 33,400 hits

I've seen and heard it in several places, thought the meaning was reasonably clear, didn't make much of it. Not so obscure a concept, and not that neologistic.

I hadn't thought it to be neologistic; I just hadn't heard it before, and I would have expected to. I have read a lot about the placebo effect. I could have sworn there was another word or phrase for nocebo effect, but I can't think of it now. What is it called, for example, when husbands develop symptoms when their wives are pregnant or when doctors and nurses experience symptoms of conditions they are studying?

Sympathetic pregnancy for the first one I think.Old joke about placebos: A woman goes to her doctor about her husband being ill. The doctor says that he's just a hypochondriac and that's there's nothing wrong with him, but he'll prescribe some harmless tablets as a placebo to keep her husband happy that he's being treated.The wife replies that he hates tablets and will refuse to take them. The doctor says to mash them up into his food and he'll never know!

I thought of sympathetic pregnancy, too, also known as couvade or couvade syndrome.

Tinman

Wow, another new word! I haven't heard of that one either. I know I am not thinking of hypochondriac, but it's something like that.

quote:

Originally posted by Kalleh:
What is it called, for example, when husbands develop symptoms when their wives are pregnant or when doctors and nurses experience symptoms of conditions they are studying?

Sometimes it's called the 'Couvade syndrome'. French couver to hatch: couvade = couvée (COVEY) or couvement (brooding, sitting on eggs); whence the derisive phrase, faire la couvade ‘to sit cowring or skowking within dores, to lurke in the campe when Gallants are at the Battell’.(OED)

Couvade is used by some writers to mean the ‘man-childbed’ -- a series of customs according to which, on the birth of a child, the father performs acts or simulates states natural or proper to the mother, or abstains for a time from certain foods or actions, as if he were physically affected by the birth.
I am don' think that this is the correct term for nurses or doctors who develop hypochondriacal symptoms 'caught' from their patients.